http://www.catherinelacey.com/
Catherine Lacey is a 2012 NYFA Fiction Fellow. She has published work in The Believer, The Atlantic.com, a Harper Perennial's 40 Stories, Diagram and others. She writes for Brooklyn Magazine rather often and is a founding partner of 3B, a cooperatively operated bed and breakfast in downtown Brooklyn.
A few weeks ago I read The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato, a novella of the “this is why I am so crazy” genre of first-person fiction. After reading it I decided that when it’s done well these kinds of narratives can be really compelling and I started to wonder what other kinds of stories like this are out there.
Then a real-life one surfaced. You might have heard about this story. A psychopathic man walks into his gym, shuts off the lights and starts shooting. Three women died, many others were critically injured including a pregnant 26-year-old aerobics instructor and her husband. Then he killed himself. Turns out the guy kept a journal and a blog and even posted confessional videos on youtube.
I’ve been going back and forth about whether or not I should even post this here. I decided that I would because as creepy and sad and strange as this edited version of his journal (pdf) is, it’s still perversely interesting. Literature it is not, but somehow it makes the case that “this is why I’m crazy” fiction is only that. Only fiction. The minds of the truly deranged, I think, do not make for good reading.
Liza Monroy’s debut novel, Mexican High, came out last summer (2008) from Speigel & Grau and the paperback was released a few months ago. The novel’s protagonist is Mila, a high school senior who moves to Mexico City when her mother gets a job in the embassy. There’s already a lot of dramatic potential in a high schooler’s life, and adding in the class tensions, rampant drug use and oppulent wealth of the expensive prep school where Mila lands just makes the drama of adolescence that much more high stakes. It’s a wonder there aren’t a lot more novels set in high school. I interviewed Liza over email…LM: I am enormously influenced by place. As an only child with a single mom who moved around all the time, I got to spend a lot of time alone growing up in foreign countries and on weekends and holidays all Mom wanted to do was travel, so that was a huge thing for me, taking in places. READ MORE >
He's so cute when he's angry
The other night, just after I read that Chabon essay about the Wilderness of Childhood, I watched This Is England on a whim and I was positively floored. It’s about a twelve year old boy in rural England in 1983 who becomes entangled with a twenty-something skinhead, who exposes the boy to a lot of violence and extremism. (The two main characters mirror each other perfectly: a child who is forced to act like a man and a man who can’t help but act like a child.)
The first thing that stood out to me was how beautifully it was plotted. Maybe I just picked up on this because my boyfriend has been reading John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction to me in any spare moment he finds, but we both couldn’t help but gush about how each scene was perfectly weighted to balance each plot line: the political context, racial tension, the boy’s romantic interest, the two main character’s back-stories and ideas about family and fatherhood.
Also, it’s acted beautifully, written beautifully and is somehow extremely funny, horrifying, engrossing, violent, and heartbreaking all at once. It’s the kind of movie that I feel is an education in plot and character development. It’s up on Netflix and you can stream it right now if you’re so inclined. I already want to watch it again.
What are some other movies that you feel have been beneficial/influential to your writing?
Michael Chabon has a great essay in this week’s issue of The New York Review of Books about the inherent literary potential of childhood. Some of my favorite stories have children as protagonists or main characters, but I’ve been reluctant to wonder why that is, thinking that I probably like childhood stories because I am easily seduced by nostalgia. But no! Chabon articulates a more complex reason that childhood narratives are so appealing: “Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity.”
I hate thinking or talking about the business side of writing, but Jason Rice just sent me this link to a conversation in which Jonathan Evison and Jason Rice are sussing out the Getting An Agent And Making A Living Problem. That’s all I am going to say about that.
PS: People in the Broolyn region should come to an art opening tonight at Melville House. Jim Osman has some really interesting wall sculptures up and we’re going to have wine and snacks and look at them.
Tons of novels for only $5, including Here They Come by Yannick Murphy, Stephen Dixon’s I & End of I, many copies of McSweeney’s quarterly, and tons of others.
Butler gets some New York free-alternative-weekly love. Interview in L magazine hitting plastic orange newstands and subway cars all over New York right about now.
Back that ass up...
This morning on the Melville House blog, Moby Lives, editor Kelly Burdick posted a dance track featuring Phillip Roth doing some “Jewish Shouting.” DJ James Marcus, critic, translator and author of Amazonia, is responsible for the madness. Marcus interviewed Roth last September for the LA Times, and during the interview, Roth gave Marcus an example of what he called “Jewish Shouting,” which Marcus (who is also a musician) turned into a short dance track. You can find the track here. You have basically not lived until you can dance to the wails of Phillip Roth.
Over on the New York Time’s Papercuts blog, they do this thing called Stray Questions, where they ask different authors the same three questions: what are you working on right now, what are you reading right now, and how does the internet help or hinder your work? Simple enough. Writers can blabber on and on about whateverthehell they’re reading at the moment, and some are willing to talk about their brilliant but unfinished novels, but it’s that last question that gets me. I like Geoff Dyer’s answer the best. Here it is:
It helps in all the obvious ways but mainly it hinders. Where it used to gnaw and nibble away at my ability to concentrate, now it is taking huge great chomps and I fear that soon I will have absolutely no ability to concentrate on anything, will be floundering in a state of endless distraction for the rest of my days and will never accomplish anything again READ MORE >
Here’s a rumination on pancakes from Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist. The context is that a man is trying to convince his consciousness to fly out of a pancake house but is having trouble separating his mind and body, possibly because he just ate delicious, destructive pancakes…
We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes form feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake– Pancakes! Pancakes!— that we never learn to respect. We promise ourselves that we will know better, next time, than to order pancakes in any size or in any amount. Never again will we we tempted by buckwheat or buttermilk or blueberry flapjacks. However, we fail to learn; and the days go by, two or three weeks pass, then a month, and we forget about pancakes the domination over us. Eventually, we need them. We crawl back to pancakes again and again.